BADD 2015: Wikipedia Against Disablism, Part 2

Ahem.  Hello? Hello?

Okay, I'm here for BADD 2015, because how could I break our ten-year streak of participation? I couldn't.  I'm not so much of a blogger these days, but I'm willing to add my bit to the big event.  For our past nine appearances in the series:

2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006. (For the record, the 2007 and 2008 entries are two of my favorite blog posts I've ever written, on any blog, or any topic.  BADD has been good for me.)

Last year I wrote about why Wikipedia needs more and better content on disability topics, and how anyone can help; and how that fights disablism, by shifting language, removing cliches, decreasing melodrama, respecting personhood, perhaps in small ways, but for a big diverse audience that will never see your blog or your journal article.  I'm still pretty involved there, and in the past year I've found more ways to discover stories to improve Wikipedia's disability content; so I'm still preaching that same sermon today.

But first:

Headline from a 1910 Aberdeen Herald newspaper, from Aberdeen, Washington, reads "Ableism the Issue; All Others Sunk into Insignificance in this County; All kinds of Diversions are Attempted by the Abel Press, but are not Successful. What is Abel Spending So Much Money For?" From Newspapers.com

Eliza Suggs (1876-1908), temperance activist

That headline didn't actually have anything to do with disability or discrimination, but I was still startled to see the word "Ableism" appear in a newspaper from over a century ago!  I found this because I acquired a Newspapers.com subscription through The Wikipedia Library, a project that matches experienced Wikipedia editors with scholarly resources that aren't always available for off-campus folks.  So far it's been extremely useful, and hardly a day passes without finding something fascinating.  Like the tidbit above. 

One of the ways I'm using searchable old newspapers like this is to find the disability stories that are hiding, that are lost, that we forgot, that we need to remember.  Not all of them made the big national papers, but they survive in local dailies, and sometimes there's plenty to meet Wikipedia's criteria for notability and reliable sources, and start a new entry. Maybe everyone knows about Helen Keller, or thinks they do, enough to put her on US currency (again). But there are so many others worth learning about!  Some American biographical examples, from recent wanderings on Wikipedia or in old US newspapers:

1. Eliza Suggs (1876-1908):  "Carried in arms or wheeled about in a carriage, her frail hands and well developed head have accomplished wonders, obtaining a fair education, which makes her a valuable assistant, sometimes as secretary of religious organizations and work. In former years she assisted her father, more or less, in evangelistic work, and she has presided in public meetings with marked dignity and ability." Suggs was born in Illinois, to parents who met while they were enslaved on a Mississippi plantation; she had osteogenesis imperfecta (OI), and was a temperance activist alongside her preacher father, and later on her own.  I didn't write this entry but I'm glad somebody did.  Here's her memoir online, along with a photo of Miss Suggs (above, right).

2. Anita Lee Blair (1916-2010) was the first blind woman to serve in any US state legislature.  I wrote about her on DSTU a few years ago, and finally got her Wikipedia entry started earlier this year.  I found a campaign ad of hers from 1952 in a Texas newspaper recently, too, featuring her guide dog Fawn, and text proclaiming her achievements and her independence.

"Fear" (1981) by Elizabeth Layton;
a drawing of an older woman peeking
out from a closet with a fearful expression

3. Elizabeth Layton (1909-1993) was an artist based in Kansas who found her art late in life, in a drawing class she took at age 68, hoping it would help with her lifelong struggles with depression, and with more acute grief following the death of her son.  It did help, and it also brought her national acclaim:  in 1992 she was the focus of a show at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art.  I started her Wikipedia entry last week.  At left, a 1981 drawing by Elizabeth Layton, titled "Fear."  (Were you expecting sentimental art from an old lady?  Her drawings were edgy, even controversial.)

4. Dwight D. Guilfoil Jr. (1926-1989) was a businessman and a disabled veteran, who advocated for hiring disabled workers, and used his own company to demonstrate the possibilities.  Guilfoil doesn't have a Wikipedia entry yet, but I think he'd be a great candidate for one.  For now, check out an essay he wrote titled "Let's Stop 'Handicapping' Americans," which appeared in syndication, in newspapers across the US, in 1960.

UPDATE (February 2016): Dwight D. Guilfoil Jr. has a wikipedia entry now.

5. Mary Dobkin (1902-1987) was a immigrant child in Baltimore when she lost both feet to frostbite as a little girl. This early experience, and a lifelong love of baseball, made her a tireless advocate for poor kids in her adopted city; she coached kids' teams, integrated during the Jim Crow era, and took particular interest in providing sports opportunities for disabled kids.  There was a television movie made about her in 1979, but until today, no Wikipedia entry.  So I'll get right on that.




By the end of today, California time, there will be a new Wikipedia entry on Mary Dobkin, in honor of BADD 2015.  (I'll light up her name as a link when the entry is up.)  Anyone want to join in?  Plenty of other stories to tell, and every well-told story helps.

The Encyclopedia of American Disability History

[Image description: Three volumes of the Encyclopedia of American Disability History, overlapping each other, on a table]

Just realized I hadn't posted about this here yet--the Encyclopedia of American Disability History (Facts-on-File 2009) is now out, for real, in print. And it's heavy, too. If you're a longtime reader here, you may notice that several entries seem eerily familiar; that's because they started as blog posts right here at DS,TU. I wrote about 25 entries in the encyclopedia, and compiled the "common quotes" feature, and a lot of recent dates for the timeline (again, by looking through the DS,TU archives!).

Cerrie Burnell's Arm

The BBC recently introduced new presenters on their popular children's show, CBeebies: Alex Winters and Cerrie Burnell. They're pictured at left, in a publicity still. Both young, white, conventionally attractive, with big grins for the camera. They're dressed in kid-friendly purple and green sweaters, sitting on a comfy couch with satiny pillows. And Cerrie has a noticeably short arm, ending just below the elbow.

Well, that last detail of the picture is apparently a problem for some parents. They say her appearance is "unsuitable" for a children's show, that the sight of her will "scare" children, even to the point of giving them nightmares. Complaints have been filed. Message boards on the subject brim with panic and ignorance. And it is the parents' problem, not the kids' concern: as Lucy Mangan writes about physical difference in a Guardian editorial on the subject, "To a young child, it is just another element of a large and confusing world that they want to inquire about, no more fearsome or embarrassing than any other."

So, of course kids are going to ask, that's what they do--and they're going to take their cues from how their parents answer those questions. Not just the words, either, but the tone, the body language--I posted some tips here a few years ago.

And think about this--if you're telling your children this lovely young woman is too frightful to behold, what are you telling them more generally about beauty? about perfection? What kind of impossible box are you asking them to fit into, and stay inside, for your approval?

YouTube and Disability Activism

Last Sunday, I was moved to post about Flickr and disability history; today, I'm watching another online forum for user-generated content. It's hard to get mainstream news cameras to point away from the red carpet on Oscar weekend; but it's not hard to put a video on YouTube, and quite a few videos from the Jerry Lewis protests are already up (as I type this, the Oscars haven't started yet). Here's a digest of the ones I can find.

DESCRIPTION: These involve long interviews with Sarah Watkins, Simi Linton, Laura Hershey, and others, articulating the points of the community's objections to a humanitarian award going to Lewis. The visuals involve a lot of bright fluorescent posterboards and crowds behind the interviewees.

Scratched Paint on a Lamborghini?

Apparently, in the eyes of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, decades of incessant, patronizing, condescending pity and outdated representations of people with disabilities are the equivalent of "some scratches in the paint job...of a Lamborghini." Go check out more of this delightful analogy at TheTroublewithJerry.org ... it's not too late to sign the petition or join the Oscar-weekend protests of this "humanitarian" award.

February 10: The Stratford Co. Insane Asylum Fire (1893)

[Image description: Newspaper clipping about the 1893 asylum fire near Dover NH, with the headlines "Cremated./Forty Crazed People Burned to Death./Insane Asylum at the County Farm Burned to Ground./Horrible Scenes Enacted in a Hell of Fire and Smoke./A Calamity Without Parallel Falls upon the County of Stratford." Found here.]

In the 1890s, states and counties in the US were locating asylums away from towns. It was justified as a more healthful location, with the opportunity for therapeutic and cost-effective agricultural labor; it was also popular as an "out of sight, out of mind" solution, given the general fear of people with mental illnesses. One consequence of this location choice was that the staff generally lived on the grounds of the asylum; another consequence was that, in the event of a disaster, there was no nearby community to come help.

Thus, the Stratford County (NH) Insane Asylum fire of 1893, on this date, a snowy winter night in New Hampshire. No one knew how it was set, but it began in the room of Mrs. Mary Lafontaine, a Canadian woman with a history of "melancholia." A watchman, Wilbur Chesley, alerted others and escaped along with the keeper William Driscoll, and Driscoll's wife and children. Of the more than forty inmates locked in their rooms in a large wooden building, only three or four survived the fire. (Of the hundred or so paupers in a workhouse on the same campus, all were saved, in part because they were quickly organized into a fire brigade.) The list of the dead in a newspaper report that week includes 26 women, 13 men.*

The New York Times headline appeared on page 5 the next day: "They Laughed at the Fire: Details of the Terrible Catastrophe at Dover. Forty-One Insane Patients, Unable to Save Themselves, Were Burned Alive--The Asylum Was an Old-Fashioned Frame Structure Unfit for their Occupancy." Opined the author of the article:

The fire conveys the sad lesson, patent to all, that the custom of isolating the county workhouse miles away from the town centre is something which cannot be longer tolerated in this enlightened age.

An investigation by the state board of health also noted rampant alcoholism and incompetence among the asylum staff, and the practice of furnishing matches to inmates who smoked (as Mrs. Lafontaine did), as further factors in the disastrous fire. The county asylums in New Hampshire were abolished in part because of the board's findings, and replaced with state-run asylums.

*The various new accounts don't have matching counts of the dead.

What I should be writing about....

...but I'm not, because my connection is so unpredictable--a blog entry with links would take hours to assemble, during most parts of the day. I'm going to try a quick one here, at night, when the connection seems to work better. I'd like to be covering...

• The petition against a humanitarian "Oscar" for Jerry Lewis (but Andrea Shettle's got it covered, and Shelley Tremain too)
• Accessibility (or lack thereof) at the Inauguration next week (Ruth Harrigan has a round-up)
• Peter Dinklage on last week's episode of 30 Rock (which was terrific--Beth Haller has the story, with a photo)
• Blogger Kristina Chew's departure from Autism Vox, and arrival at Change.org
• The book I'm reading, April Witch by Majgull Axelsson (a Swedish novel, title character is disabled, living in a longterm nursing facility, lots of first-person observations on independent living, hospital life, being the object of pity, disgust, disbelief, manipulation, etc.)
• The book I read before this one, Riven Rock by T. C. Boyle (historical novel based on the real lives of Stanley McCormick and Katharine Dexter McCormick; Stanley's bouts of "derangement" were managed by various treatments, and by isolation on an estate in Montecito, California, supported by his family's wealth and monitored by his wife Katharine for decades)
• New playground in my neighborhood that's almost kinda-sorta accessible (photo to follow), and adventures in commenting at a nearby town's planning council meeting, where the question was "accessible playground or roller hockey?" (They decided, not wanting to disappoint any of the commenters, to have both, against some daunting limitations of space, but at least it's still under discussion.)

Helen Keller's Flickring

Helen Keller and Mrs. Macy (LOC)
Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

This week's batch of Flickr Commons uploads from the Library of Congress's G. G. Bain Collection includes a series of photos of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy, taken in some kind of conservatory or museum. In the photo I've featured here, Keller is seated in a wicker chair, and posed in profile, while Macy stands behind the chair and is seen face-on. Both women wear long dark dresses and have long hair arranged in low chignons at the nape. The Bain Collection photos are from 1910-1915.

If you have more information about the occasion or location of these photos, you can add that to the photos at Flickr. (The photos can also be tagged by visitors.)

Who Belongs Where

Dirksen Bauman posted a link to this Washington Post feature story on the DS-Hum listserv--seemed like something worth sharing here, where geographers are thick on the ground.

The plans for Gallaudet's campus extension include interior and exterior spaces designed for visual communication--what does that mean? Among other features, they envision classrooms large enough for meetings to be conducted in a circle, rather than in rows of front-facing desks; choosing wall treatments and colors that won't distract or complicate ASL communications; ramped walkways (not just for wheeled access, but to allow better flow of signed conversations), curved and mirrored exterior walls that allow better visual warning of approaching cross-traffic than right-angled sidewalks and buildings.

The article is a reminder that the thoughtful design supports people across a wide array of disability categories. While the space needs of wheelchair users are perhaps most quickly noticed (if not always met appropriately or creatively), there are interesting, practical ways to configure buildings and outdoor environments for better use by people with sensory, cognitive, linguistic, neurological and psychological differences as well. And it's not about "special accommodations," it's about considering, from the start of any project, our preconceptions about who belongs where.

Good recent blog on related topics: David Gissen on "heroic architecture" (h/t to Jesse the K and Badgerbag for the link).

Hang in there, Alex Barton--and your classmates, too

[Image description: Composite photo of a kindergarten class--mine--captioned "Jefferson School 11 1971-1972 Kindergarten"]

Hey Alex, what happened to you should never, ever happen to any kid, anywhere--you had a right to a kindergarten experience that left you excited about school, not one that left you feeling rejected by peers and your teacher. I know--because I had a pretty awful kindergarten teacher too. It was a long, long time ago, and I'm pretty sure she's gone now; she was on the verge of retirement when I had her. She tried to switch me from lefthanded to righthanded, moving the marker from hand to hand whenever she caught me doing my thing. (It didn't work.) When she saw me reading, she snatched the book and told me my parents had "ruined" my life by letting me learn to read so young, without expert instruction. I went home and stood on my head and tried to forget how to read, figuring she must be right. (That didn't work either.)

But what I remember most was that she humiliated a little boy, made him stand in the middle of the room and take her berating in front of all of us, for the crime of.... leaving the toilet seat up. Did any of us object? We wouldn't have dared. Did any of us reach out to him afterwards? I don't remember. Do any of those sweet little boys in that photo above look like they deserved that? They didn't. They couldn't. A lot of us, including that little boy and me, we graduated high school together--and I'm sure none of us forgot that moment.

Alex, your classmates, the ones who were led to vote against you, will be haunted by this moment. They were asked to be cruel to you, by an adult they trusted. Two of them voted in support of you, by all accounts, and they're obviously great kids, but the others aren't bad kids, just five years old. The adult in this case should be removed from the classroom and disciplined and, if possible, trained out of whatever ideas got her to this place; but the kids are just kids who were put in a terrible situation.

And Alex, you're just a kid too--and you absolutely didn't deserve this. But hang in there-- with any luck, you will also meet amazing teachers and peers, and learn, and flourish. A whole lot of us are watching now, and we expect the best for you.

Wheelchair tipping?!?!

In not one, but two, countries, intentionally tipping someone's wheelchair has come up in the news lately. What's the deal? In the London Times in January, Rod Liddle suggested in an opinion piece that

"Next time you see a young person in a wheelchair, tip it over and drag the occupant to the nearest job centre, lecturing him or her all the while on the dignity of labour."

Because the only reason a young person would use a wheelchair is to avoid employment, right? (Liddle has a long record of horrid statements about disability, but this one explicitly incites violence against disabled people, an escalation on his part.)

Moving across the Atlantic, the idea is already being put into practice--by one deputy sheriff in Hillsborough Co., Florida. Brian Sterner, a quad, was stopped on a traffic violation on 29 January and taken to the station for booking. Deputy Charlotte Marshall Jones didn't believe he was really paralyzed, so she dumped his wheelchair forwards, and he (surprise!) fell to the ground. The incident was caught on the office surveillance camera (video here, but be warned--it's distressing to see), and she has been suspended without pay. Brian Sterner, it turns out, is the former director of the Florida Spinal Cord Injury Resource Center, based in Tampa. He plays wheelchair rugby with the Tampa Generals, and he's working on a PhD.

So, to recap, some young people use wheelchairs AND work AND drive. And throwing someone to the ground is a dangerously stupid way to prove anything.

Super Tuesday

[Image description: Polling place sign, with arrow, outdoors on a brick walkway.]

In twenty states, tomorrow is a presidential primary (and it's also Mardi Gras--so vote first, then party). How accessible is your polling place? The New York Times Polling Place Photo Project isn't primarily intended to document accessibility, but by collecting images of polling places this election year, they may inadvertently create such documentation. So take a picture tomorrow, or whenever you vote; and if you can, show any access features or barriers for disabled voters.

UPDATE 2/5: My polling place is a senior center, so the wheelchair access is fine.

Falling through the net

Brent Martin's brutal, pointless death --why don't we hear more about it?

Shane Graham disappeared about eight years ago--and apparently nobody in any position of authority noticed until recently? (There's not even a photo of Graham available to authorities, and his care needs were such that it's unlikely he's still alive but unknown somewhere.)

Bloggers are telling these stories to a wider audience when no one else will--please, keep telling the stories, keep them from falling through the net. Brent and Shane were human beings who deserve to be remembered and mourned, and nobody could deserve the treatment they got.

Sunday paper tells the right story

So I looked at the front page of the LA Times today, and said, "Hey, I know them!" David Denney was a classmate of my son's a few years ago; I remember that his mother Amparo always worked for the best in their classroom. She's a great advocate for David. Their family was featured in a front-page feature story in the LA Times--but I was glad to see it wasn't the usual horrid cliched "what a burden, what saints" story about the family of a disabled kid.

Instead, this is a story about an insurance company's decision to deny the home nursing David requires, nursing that it had previously covered year after year. It explains the hoops, the forms, the calls, the letters, the appeals that followed... and how the family accessed Medi-Cal, our state's medical insurance program, to keep their son alive while the fight for continued coverage continues. The value of David's life and his status as a beloved son are never questioned here--as they too often are in stories about other families, other kids--the insurance company's decision and its impact on the Denneys are the focus of this story, and rightly so.

Public service announcement

Just in case Julia Roberts reads our blog (ha!).

This is (below, left) an Academy Award: ....... and this (below, right) is a parking placard:

They're not interchangeable. Not even in Los Angeles. (Correction: Malibu.)

Any questions?

Paging Dr. Cliche ...

The television writers are on strike. This is national news, I realize, but it's also local chatter here--I drive past the picket line at Raleigh Studios Manhattan Beach some days, it's only a mile or two from my house. I was talking to a striking writer at a small dinner gathering last night, and an assistant director who's also affected. That's LA for you. But one show's writers probably shouldn't rush back to work--if recent episodes are any indication of their mindset.

Cilla Sluga at Big Noise explained what was wrong about last week's mess on ER: an episode in which a doctor and a young teen decide the kid (who has a terminal illness) shouldn't live any longer, so they lie to the kid's mother about treatment options--and this is presented as a noble gesture on the doctor's part, not as gross malpractice. One character objects, but doesn't go farther than voicing her objection. (And as Sluga further reveals, the episode was written by an ER doctor at Children's Hospital LA--a scary twist to the story.) In this week's episode, William Peace at Bad Cripple catches another doozy: a wheelchair user is the tired "bitter cripple" stereotype, complete with lines like "anger is my baseline" (which would make a fine t-shirt, but as a summary of a disabled character, ugh). One implication of his storyline is that he can't be a good parent because, uh... because he can't clean the gutters. What?

It wasn't always like this: ER has in the past done much better by the disability community. Characters with physical, mental and sensory disabilities have been presented as rounded human beings with full civil rights, at least as well as any other 44-minute network TV drama has done (admittedly, that's a low standard to achieve). One highlight was a 1998 appearance by Neil Marcus, which was about showing disablist assumptions for the dangerous errors they are.... not about confirming those assumptions for viewers.

I hear that this is ER's last season. Maybe that's for the best.

UPDATE 12-7: William Peace notes that the 300th episode (much hyped, aired this week) was also cringe-worthy.

We do know better

We may call on the surgeon for any act upon an individual which is to benefit him. We may not treat him as we do with our cattle, for the benefit of ourselves or the state.

--Alexander Johnson, "Report of the Committee on Colonies for and Segregation of Defectives," Proceedings of the National Conference on Charities and Correction, 1903.

Happened upon this quote in an article I've assigned for my online course in US disability history this week. We're reading about the history of eugenic sterilization laws, policies, and practices this week. The idea that all disabled people, all convicted criminals, all poor folks should be sterilized once made sense to a frightening lot of Americans. It's heartening to know that, even at the height of the eugenics movement, some folks realized it was wrong, and said so, like in the quote above. Johnson and his committee were all heads of state schools for "feebleminded" children, and they all objected to the idea that sterilization should be added to their duties. In the end, their position was vindicated, but not before many thousands of routine sterilizations were performed in the next several decades, often without consent or even truthful explanations.

I wish this quote wasn't quite so timely. I wish folks didn't talk about major surgery as a casual thing (even when it's medically necessary, it's a big deal, with plenty of pain and risk, no matter what it looks like on TV). I wish the child's rights and interests were taken seriously. I wish folks weren't so squeamish about ordinary bodily functions. I wish people wouldn't use the "unless you're a parent like me you can't understand" line of defense, because that presumes parents like me understand, and I don't.

I wish we knew better. Oh wait, we do.

More on the same subject (I'll be updating these links as necessary):
Biodiverse Resistance
Falling Off My Pedestal
Miss Crip Chick's Weblog
FRIDA
(and more from FRIDA, and more still from FRIDA)
Wheelchair Dancer
(and more from Wheelchair Dancer)
My Beautiful Wickedness
Tiny Cat Pants
The Life and Times of Emma
Brown Femipower
(and more from Brown Femipower)
The Strangest Alchemy
(and more from The Strangest Alchemy, and still more from The Strangest Alchemy)
Ryn Tales Book of Days
Jemma Brown (at Ouch!)
Kintropy in Action
Wheelie Catholic
Planet of the Blind
Feministe
Growing Up with a Disability
Not Dead Yet News & Commentary
Terrible Palsy
Andrea's Buzzing About
The Gimp Parade
Arthritic Young Thing
Pipecleaner Dreams
A Tedious Delusion
A Renegade Evolution
Lisy Babe's Blog
Mind the Gap Cardiff
Diary of a Goldfish
Turtlebella
Bad Cripple
Big Noise
Quench Zine
Modus Dopens
Sunny Dreamer
Antiprincess
Walking is Overrated
Nickie's Nook
Benefit Scrounging Scum
Fetch Me My Axe
Text and the World
Bastante Already
R. Mildred
The Voyage
Maman Poulet
The Seated View

NOTE: After the last round on this topic, when we had lovely comments comparing people like my son to doorstops and turnips (thanks so much, CNN, for sending the anonymous hate this way), I'm just not going to respond to anonymous or ugly comments. In truth, I might not respond to any comments. I've got a carnival edition to assemble.

The WPAS Report: A court order is not just a formality

I'm reading the "Investigative Report Regarding the Ashley Treatment," officially released today by Disability Rights Washington (the new name of Washington Protection and Advocacy System, WPAS, as of June 1). It's not long, it's readable, and it's fascinating. The major finding is that Seattle Children's Hospital violated state law by neglecting to get a court order before performing a sterilization on a person deemed incompetent on the basis of cognitive disability.

Why didn't they get a court order? The hospital cites communication failures. Seems to me that the money quote is this one, on p. 2 of the executive summary:
"...and the individual must be zealously represented by a disinterested third party in an adversarial proceeding to determine whether the sterilization is in the individual's best interest." No court order, no disinterested third party representing the child.

But don't the parents represent the child? Not always. Also on p. 2: "Courts have... limited parental authority to consent to other types of medical interventions that are highly invasive and/or irreversible, particularly when the interest of the parent may not be identical to the interest of the patient." So even the non-sterilization aspects of the treatment in question, by their nature, probably should have been subject to outside evaluation. The surgery was also well outside existing American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines on the treatment of complications related to menstruation in minor girls (p. 11, fn 37).

The court order in sterilization cases is not just a formality--this is not a case where somebody forgot to sign some paperwork. In pursuit of a court order, the family would have had to demonstrate (among other factors) that the child was likely to engage in sexual activity, that they had tried other less drastic means of preventing conception, and that "the proposed method of sterilization entails the least invasion of the body of the individual."

Children's Hospital has acknowledged that they violated the law in this case, and has promised to establish protective and educational policies to avoid such lapses in the future. They've also agreed to notify Disability Rights Washington (a federally-mandated watchdog organization) whenever requests for similar procedures or growth-limiting drug regimens are under consideration. And, this is a big one: they say they'll include a disability rights advocate on the ethics committee in the future.

The difficult road of recovering soldiers at the Walter Reed Medical Center

Today's Sunday Washington Post features a front page story on the administrative delays and outpatient challenges that war-wounded and war-weary soldiers are facing at the United States Army's top medical facility in Washington, D.C. The editors of DS,TU wish to express our gratitude to the investigative reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull [email contacts] who spent four months conducting their undercover investigation of the out-patient world at Walter Reed. This is a major story that is getting heavy play in the blogosphere [see commentary of Pastor Dan]. Please share your thoughts with your congressional representatives; let them know that you care about the disabled veteran of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. We need to bear witness to and express our compassion for these men and women.

Share this shortened link, http://tinyurl.com/32sfbd

Update: The fallout from this published expose has been swift. Following the resignation of the general in charge of the Walter Reed Medical Center, Maj. Gen. George W. Weightman, on Thursday, the news arrived Friday, March 02, 2007 that Secretary of the Army, Francis J. Harvey, had also been asked to resign by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

In the news...

Update on the Rod Liddle editorial from last week's Times of London: today were published some replies (under the unfortunate headline "Coping with Disability"), including one brief comment, "I have no choice but to live with my disability, but I can choose not to be afflicted with Liddle's opinions." Unfortunately, when those ugly opinions are widely held, they're an affliction for all of us, whether we read them or not.

And big kudos to Joseph Shapiro, whose excellent NPR reporting from the Katrina zone this morning is worth a listen if you get a chance, here. Listen to a medical evacuation organizer tell Carmen Vidaurre that her son Joseph's wheelchair can't be loaded onto the plane. Listen to Curt Decker, executive director of the National Disability Rights Network, comment that "There were really three vectors involved here, race, poverty, and disability."

On the same subject, Marta Russell has a new commentary up at Znet today, Being Disabled and Poor in New Orleans.